Victor del Arbol - The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel (35 page)

Before, he used to allow her to walk around the house, even go out to the small backyard. There was no danger there; the tall fence protected them from indiscreet looks and was impossible for her to scale. That freedom seemed to improve, at first, her mood. She behaved like a real courtesan with him, without showing signs of her own thoughts, as he had taught her. She was only attentive to his desires, to serving him. Sometimes, even, when he demanded his right to lie with her, she didn’t oppose him with animal resistance, biting and kicking, nor did she remain passive with mute recrimination. She could soften him with a look of supplication or complicity, depending on the moment, and he was happy to stop forcing her. But it was all an illusion. She had revealed herself to be as fine a strategist as he was. It took her more than a year to gain his trust. Then, one night, she tried to escape through one of the windows that wasn’t bricked up. He managed to grab her just as she was reaching the gate.

He wouldn’t make the same mistake again. No more niceties. No more freedom. She would live out the rest of her days naked, tied with a chain around her neck, and eating off the floor. If there was one thing he could not abide, it was betrayal.

*   *   *

Marta heard the door open. Not a single fiber in her body flinched, although her heart was beating wildly. The man walked in and stopped beside her. He took off his clothes calmly, folded them carefully, and placed them on the wooden bench. Then he dragged her by a link of the chain to the mattress, and he lay down beside her, wrapping himself in the warmth of her body. He took Marta’s hand and brought it to his chest, forcing her to touch those wounds.

Marta didn’t realize that he was crying until she felt the tears fall onto her hand. She held her breath to keep from vomiting at the touch of that skinned body filled with horrible burns that turned his thorax and legs into an enormous scaly black scar.

“Why are you crying?” she said, immediately regretting, and surprised by, her words.

He let Marta’s body go as if he had suddenly died. The truth mattered little inside those bricked-in walls.

“Because very soon they will no longer need you. And Publio won’t let me keep you. I will have to kill you.”

Marta’s eyes kept shining in silence as always, shining so much that she seemed about to cry. There was nothing more invasive than that gaze.

“And why don’t you let me escape?”

He rolled over, leaning on one shoulder. In spite of the darkness, he could see the fear in Marta’s face.

“Your fate is tied to mine, whether you like it or not.”

Marta plucked up her courage.

“Really, I’m already dead. You killed me.”

His face contracted. He got up and went in search of a bucket of water and a sponge.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore … Now wash me for dinner.”

Marta was forced to once again carry out the revolting ritual of sponge-bathing that monster’s body. She had to do it slowly, with slight circular motions, as if she were polishing a delicate crystal cup. And as she did it, she again discovered every corner of that tormented geography that had grown before her eyes over the years. When she finished, the man released her from the chain.

“Make dinner,” he said, leaving the room.

Marta cried in gratitude when she felt the relief of the clamp falling to the floor. She stood up, staggering on starved legs, and walked with resignation toward the dirty light of the hallway.

The kitchen was as wretched as the rest of the house. In one corner was the butane burner with a Formica cupboard detached from the wall and a shelf painted blue, where the scratched cups, plates, and dish towels were lined up next to bottles of wine. On the table covered with an oilcloth marked with cigarette holes there were several jars with handwritten labels:
COFFEE, SUGAR, SALT, PASTA
.

Marta pushed aside the jars and lit a candle that was held up by an empty olive jar. She placed a plate and a clean spoon beside two paper napkins. She served wine from one of the bottles on the shelf. Then she went over to the burner, where a pot of boiling water was steaming. For a second she weighed the possibility of throwing it on him. But the man was watching her vigilantly from a prudent distance, playing with a knife blade. She didn’t have any real possibility of succeeding. And besides, she knew that they weren’t alone. In some part of the house were the guards. She poured in some noodles, added a little salt, and checked that everything was ready.

“Ready,” she said.

He came over slowly, took Marta by the back of the neck, not violently but firmly, and whispered in her ear.

“Ready what?”

Marta swallowed hard.

“Ready … Great Sir.”

“This is something else, isn’t it?” he said, slapping his thighs. His skin barely hurt that night, and that led to a certain feeling of well-being.

Marta retired to one side. Until he finished she was not allowed to eat, and her dinner would be his leftovers. That was how things worked.

“What are you thinking about?”

Marta heard that sinister voice. Then she was struck by it all. The loneliness and the horror. In the darkness she felt that her past life, which she could barely remember, was vanishing as if it had never existed.

“Nothing.”

He half closed his eyes. She too had been eaten away by the mechanisms of disappointment. In her eyes there was only sadness and resignation. He imagined that he would end up that way soon, too. Every once in a while, as he moved forward to slurp the spoon, the fragrance of her body made its way to his nose. It was a sad aroma, like a slight drop of rain floating on the dry leaf of a stunted tree.

Publio had said that it would all end soon. Would she want to go with him when it was all over? Deep down in his heart he knew the answer was no, that he would have to kill her as he had killed the women who’d shared his wait before her. Yet he still had a faint hope. He got up and went over to the window. It had rained, and the drops of water slid on the timbers like shiny insects trapped by the moonlight.

“I’m finished. You can eat.”

Marta calmly drained the noodles in the colander. She wasn’t hungry, but she forced herself to dish up a bowl. She sat at the table and served herself a little wine.

“Go get dressed,” he ordered her when she had finished eating. Marta trembled. She knew what that meant, but there was nothing she could do about it. She went to the room and returned a few minutes later.

He looked at her carefully. The resemblance was remarkable, especially when she put on those clothes. She was splendid in her Japanese lady costume. The kimono was blue and had lovely embroidery and strange flowers in black thread. She really looked like a beautiful oriental princess, with her pale face, her eyes made almond-shaped with henna, and the outline of her lips marked in thick pencil.

“Is it hers?” asked Marta.

“Who are you talking about?”

“The clothes stored there, in the locked room … Do they belong to that woman in the picture? Is that why you force me to do this?”

He stared at Marta. His mouth cracked for a tenth of a second in an expression of displeasure. He closed his eyes. The past was a desert lying in wait that grew at every moment. Wind whistling through the ruins of an abandoned city, filled with corpses drying in the sun among cracked stones. That hot, deadly air, filled with dusty flies, was the only thing he had in his head.

*   *   *

The first time he killed, he wasn’t even aware of what he was looking for. He was barely seventeen years old. He found a bar with the gates half lowered. The neon sign was already turned off. The bartender greeted him with an irritated expression. He served him and left the bottle on the bar. Then he started to push crap from one side to the other behind the bar with a grimy broom. With all the lights on, that place showed its true face. The carpet was covered with stains and cigarette burns. The linoleum floor was sticky and chipped. The walls were dirty and cracked. He didn’t mind. He hadn’t come for the interior decorating. He hadn’t come for anything. Including company. He ignored the whore who approached him, a servant on in years who stretched like a hungry cat when she saw him come in. Old Dalila headed off, ruminating in her toothless mouth the failure of her fallen, well-worn flesh.

A weak, feverish young woman took her place, with the indelible traces of heroin in her yellowing mouth and gaunt face. She sat beside him without saying anything, aware of her scarce possibilities, but still decided to give it a go. The girl, with desperate heroics, showed him her black pussy with fallen, cracked lips. He rejected it with a sad expression. The young woman insisted. She took his hand and brought it to her cold crotch. He let her place his fingers on the tangle of pubic hair like an exhausted butterfly. The young woman smiled, the smile of a stray dog happy with a caress. Finally, he agreed to go with her. There was something in her face, with its small eyes and dull skin, that he found attractive.

“What’s your name?” she asked, trapping his flaccid penis delicately yet firmly.

He wasn’t drunk; he hadn’t even drunk enough to pretend that he was. He was just unable to get a workable erection.

“You can call me Great Sir.”

The young woman smiled, opened her legs, and pressed against his thigh, pointing to a door. Her eyes were now of the forest, and she smiled maliciously.

“Okay, Great Sir. That is my room.” They went up a worn marble staircase that led to the upper floor. They went into the room. It was clean. A Bellini nude decorated the wall. A lovely nude of a woman who covered her pubis modestly. He smiled at such feigned innocence. He went over to the open window. He didn’t want to be there, but there he was. The young woman had taken off her shoes and was lying on the bed, faceup, with her right leg leaning over the left protecting her crotch. Her dress slid along her skin to the inner thigh, showing the lace of a garter and the insinuating presence of her bare sex. A fallen strap over her shoulder indicated the path to a pointy breast protected by a light filled with warm nuances. He approached the wide bed, with iron headboard and canopy. His hand naturally found the route between the woman’s legs up to her dry sex that opened to his fingers without hesitation.

He felt empty. None of his lovers had ever filled him beyond the infinitesimal instant of orgasm, and afterward, right away, the ice appeared in their eyes. In their souls. Sex was no different than any other physiological act, eating, excreting, sleeping …

“Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” the whore asked him. He smiled. He took off his trench coat. “What’s that?” the young woman asked with surprise. “A sword?”

“A katana,” he clarified, before cutting off her head with a sure stroke. He still remembered well that confused mix of pleasure and remorse that he felt: the prostitute’s bloody head in his hands; her lifeless body bleeding in spurts from the carotid artery, fallen to one side on the rug. On the bed, the katana with its blade stained with blood and traces of scalp. It had been easy, he told himself; much easier than he had thought.

*   *   *

He had never again felt the same sensation, in spite of searching time and time again in so many deaths. Only Marta gave him a similar feeling. Keeping her alive, playing each day with the possibility of killing her, made him feel good. Allowing her to live was something that transported him to a state of demigod. Something that he wanted to prolong indefinitely. He closed his eyes, shivering with a gentle pleasure, nothing ostentatious, until he lost the notion of what was and what wasn’t. His mind stopped shouting at him and slipped into a lethargic silence, experiencing the numerous sensations that allowed him distance from his emptiness.

He forced Marta to turn her back to him, and he penetrated her from behind. And as he did it he felt the presence of the woman in the portrait in the room next door, looking at him in silent reproach.

“You never understood me, Mother,” he moaned, trying to get the dead gaze off of the back of his neck.

22

Barcelona, August 1955

He was still there. Lining up in front of the barracks hut that held the Germans and the Spanish prisoners from the Blue Division. How many were left? Barely a few dozen of the thousands who had arrived in the prison camp in 1945. Yet they survived, unnaturally, incomprehensibly; they kept lining up beneath the snow, every morning, one after the other, surrounded by the Siberian desert. There weren’t even bars or walls or barbed-wire fences. There were barely soldiers. The entire steppe was his prison. What time was it? Maybe the morning, he wasn’t sure. The sun in those latitudes is like a reflection of the moon. It never moves. The cold, the steamy breath, the thud of bare feet against the snow. The hunger. That he remembered. Why had the guards made them line up? Pedro was optimistic. They are going to let us go, he said every time they forced them out of the barracks unexpectedly. But Fernando was suspicious. He feared the worst. He had seen groups of Chechen, Georgian, and Ukrainian prisoners working on the nearby train tracks. The guards treated them worse than dogs. They didn’t eat; they worked in rags, with bare hands. They slept wrapped in threadbare blankets, and they died by the hundreds. It was obvious that the guards’ intent was to decimate them. Fernando and the other prisoners at least had a roof with holes in it, water they could boil, some potatoes they could steal. If the guards decided to use them to fill the losses in the forced work brigades, they weren’t going to survive.

But that time Pedro Recasens was right. The guard looked at them with his gaze filled with vodka and tundra. He pointed to them with his gloved finger and, without emotion, said the words:
You are free. Go back to Spain. Thank Comrade Stalin for his generosity with your General Franco.

*   *   *

“Excuse me, sir, we are closing up the cafeteria.”